Iowa: Opening shots of War of 2012

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian military theorist, had it backward when he wrote, “War is politics by other means.” He should have said: “Politics is war by other means.”

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This year’s presidential campaign will be a war of total annihilation. Look at what just happened to Newt Gingrich. He got totally annihilated by the most fearsome weapon of war in the history of American politics: the super PAC.

In any war, when an army gets a new and powerful weapon, it won’t hesitate to use it. Like the atomic bomb. This year’s new weapon is the super PAC. Super PACs can collect contributions in unlimited amounts and spend them any way they want — as long as their activities are uncoordinated with any campaign.

Is that legal? It is now. Because the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the government cannot limit independent spending to influence elections.

Enter Restore Our Future, a super PAC run by former Mitt Romney operatives. Restore Our Future spent twice as much money in Iowa as the Romney campaign did — almost all of it on anti-Gingrich ads. Romney could and did disassociate himself from the attacks. The ads were not run by his campaign.

That’s why super PACS are so powerful. There’s no blowback. They damage the target without doing collateral damage to the candidate they favor. While Gingrich’s support collapsed in Iowa, Romney’s support remained steady.

Nearly half of all the ads in Iowa were anti-Gingrich. They attacked the former speaker for, among other things, his position on illegal immigration, his ethics violations, and his past views on climate change and health care.

Gingrich left these many charges unanswered, for two reasons. One, they were mostly true. Two, he had no money to defend himself.

Gingrich tried to make a virtue of necessity — by promising not to run any ads criticizing his Republican opponents. He couldn’t have paid for them if he wanted to. Instead, Gingrich asked Iowans to vote for him to make a statement that negative ads don’t work.

But they do work. Gingrich would have won the caucuses if they had been held in early December. By early January, however, after weeks of relentless attacks over the airwaves, Gingrich’s support in Iowa was cut by more than half.

Gingrich’s Iowa campaign will live forever as a case study in what happens if you are faced with a negative campaign and don’t fight back. Alongside Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004.

The Republican Party establishment poured money into the Romney Super PAC to stop Gingrich. They know Gingrich can’t beat Obama. It’s the same tactic they used to obliterate Dukakis back in 1988. The racially incendiary Willie Horton ads were run by an independent spending committee that year, not by the George H.W. Bush campaign.

It’s the same tactic they used to demolish Sen. John Kerry’s war hero credentials in 2004, when he was attacked by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — also an independent spending committee.